What are the best promotional products?

A 2022 study released by ASI Research found the top 5 influential promotional products in the US. They surveyed 39,451 people and these were the findings:

Outerwear
Performance wear
Masks
Health & Safety
Polo Shirts

The promo industry is no joke. This massive arena brought in $23.2B in annual revenue in 2021. In terms of effectiveness, 80% of consumers own promotional t-shirts.

Are promotional products effective?

According to ASI Research, 85% of people remember promotional products.

In the same study, 40% of people who own promotional products have kept it more than 10 years and 23% of people purchased promotional products in the last year. Promo items are one of the best ways to deliver your brand message neatly packaged as a valuable product worth keeping.

The promotional product industry caters to advertisers and marketers who want to promote their brand and build awareness. As it turns out, people who are given promotional products are more likely to do business with the company that gifted them product.

Why do promotional products work?

Let’s talk numbers because well, everyone likes numbers that add up.

ASI reports that the average number of impressions (eyes) that a piece of promotional outerwear (hoodies, sweatshirts, jackets, etc.) receives in its lifetime is 6,100. T-shirts bring in 3,400 lifelong impressions.

When we consider the COGS (cost of goods sold) for a custom hoodie through a partner like Epicome, you’re looking to spend around $22 each for a quality hoodie with custom print, embroidery, and/or patchwork.

Taking only COGS into account, we learn that these 6,100 lifetime impressions cost you $.003 each! That’s amazing, really.

For all the media buyers out there who want to compare impressions alone, let’s illustrate using CPM (cost per thousand impressions) as a metric; here’s a comparison for you:

Meta (previously Facebook Ads) can sometimes charge around $30 CPM for an ad to show to a thousand people while the Epicome hoodie worn by a customer will cost around $3 CPM for a single hoodie! Just imagine when you have thousands of branded hoodies on the backs of your loyal fans. Well, they effectively become walking billboards for your brand.

Is there a difference between branded apparel and promotional products?

The two are quite similar actually. However, branded apparel is typically used to drive revenue and acts as a product extension for a brand. Have you ever been to a restaurant or gym and noticed branded apparel for sale on your way out?

How about Levi’s or Calvin Klein? Ever catch yourself wearing their branded apparel? This type of branding not only raises awareness and loyalty but helps drive revenue as a sort of product line extension.

Alternatively, when it comes to promotional products, these tend to be used to promote events, teams, corporations, and more. Many non-profits like to offer branded promotional apparel for free as a way to give back to donors.

How to order promotional products

It's quite easy to offer promo products and branded apparel on site. Here's how to get started:

Browse through the vast Epicome catalog to find styles that would work for your use case. Epicome features many bodies that are unisex and designed to fit both men and women. Select your favorite styles and colors.
Decorate your selection using your own artwork. We offer so many customization techniques from print to embroidery that will truly help your brand pop!
Add custom packaging. Go so far as to add your logo to hangtags and clothing labels for a final look.
Order and receive your promotional apparel and offer it to the public!

How to sell promotional products

This brings us to our final and favorite point. How to properly sell promotional products. Well, first of all, you certainly don’t have to. Promotional products can be used as a marketing tool to build brand awareness.

But, when you do want to use promo merch or branded apparel to drive revenue AND awareness, you can follow what our client AuM Apparel has successfully done. This Canadian yoga studio is home to many loyal yoga practitioners who frequent AuM’s studio weekly. This company teaches spiritual and internal healing techniques and wanted to release its own line of apparel to build a community around their brand mission.

They selected top quality Epicome hoodies and customized it using our color palettes. Then, they added their custom AuM logo and messaging and made the products available on their beautiful site: